Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America by Amy F. Ogata (review)

The historical field of childhood studies is now nearly sixty years old, if we take as our starting point the appearance of Philippe Ariès’s classic 1958 study Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (originally published in French as L’enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime). The particular force of Ariès’s book, which surveyed shifts in the conception of childhood and its attendant practices in early modern Europe, was to put forward the case for childhood as a historically and socially determined category of discourse rather than an objective moment in the human biological life cycle.

One of Ariès’s key contentions, one frequently overlooked in the works that followed in the wake of his book, was that the material culture of childhood was central to its establishment as a separate sphere. For Ariès the objects and spaces of childhood did not merely reflect a notional separateness of childhood but operated to construct childhood and the child as different from the world of adulthood and adults, visibly and tangibly defining its boundaries and its distinction from this other world (even if, as was often the case, these objects and spaces were no more than replicas in miniature of those in the world of the grown-ups).

If this aspect of childhood was initially little taken up by historians, the past two decades have seen this trend reversed in a growing number of scholarly works and museum exhibitions dedicated to the design of objects and environments for children.¹ Amy F. Ogata’s Designing the Creative Child: Playthings and Places in Midcentury America, a recent entry into this field, makes a signal contribution to our understanding of the significance of design for children in the cultural landscape of the United States after World War II.

Ogata’s lucid and engaging study demonstrates how new ideas about children’s natural creativity and expressiveness, formulated in the postwar decades by psychologists, educators, philosophers, and social theorists, were materialized, packaged, and disseminated through a range of designed objects and spaces that included educational toys, play structures, suburban playrooms, schools, and children’s museums. These “playthings and places” that constitute the core of Ogata’s book are seen as both embodying then-current ideas about childhood and actively shaping the new figure of “the creative child.” They are, she writes, “at once the material embodiment of this abstract social and educational discourse and also actors whose material properties transformed popular understanding of creativity” during this same period (ix). Giving tangible—and consumable—form to a new ideal of the child as a naturally creative, expressive, and imaginative being, these objects were sold to anxious parents, educators, and legislators as a means to nurture and sustain the child’s creative impulses, which otherwise might be lost to a dangerous and numbing conformity.

In the first part of her book, Ogata sets out the context in which the notion of the creative child grew and flourished, ultimately taking hold of the national imagination during the 1950s and 1960s. She demonstrates how a wave of interest in child rearing and its institutions driven by massive demographic shifts (the so-called baby boom) became interlaced with Cold War anxieties over the loss of America’s creative spark and concomitant concerns over the future of the nation’s children. Surveying postwar writings by David Riesman, William H. Whyte, and others, Ogata argues that social conformity, far from being the universal desideratum of an essentially conservative decade, increasingly figured in these years as precipitating a dangerous crisis in national character. In the context of Cold War tensions, these works warned of an impending loss of American exceptionalism: if the nation was to sustain its prominence in the world, it must do so by fostering the natural creativity of its citizens, beginning with...